1. Field
The present application relates generally to online fantasy sports games, and more particularly to assigning confidence values to predicted outcomes in online fantasy sports games.
2. Related Art
User interfaces for assigning confidence weights to predicted outcomes in fantasy sports games are known in the art. For example, in existing College Bowl “Pick 'Em” games, users predict which team will win an upcoming sports game, and users also specify their level of confidence in the prediction. A user specifies the confidence by assigning a weight value to a team in each upcoming game, where the weight value represents the user's confidence that the team will win the game. For example, a user may assign a weight value of 100 to indicate high confidence that the team will win the game, or a weight value of 1 to indicate low confidence. In that example, the predicted outcome is that a particular team will win a particular real-life college football game. Existing user interfaces for assigning these weight values are cumbersome, involve multiple user interface elements, leave multiple steps of the task to the user, and allow users to create inconsistent configurations that violate game rules. For example, existing interfaces may allow a user to assign the same confidence value to multiple teams although the game rules require a different confidence value for each team.
In existing confidence score games, such as the College Bowl Pick 'Em game, a list of match ups, e.g., games, is presented to the user. The user chooses a predicted winner for each match up, then assigns confidence points to each predicted winner. As introduced above, confidence points correspond to weights that range from low values to high values, where a higher value, e.g., 100 on a scale of 1 to 100, represents a high confidence and means that the user thinks the outcome is likely to occur, while a lower value, e.g., 1 on a scale of 1 to 100, represents a low confidence, and means that the user thinks the outcome is unlikely to occur. The user assigns a different confidence point value to each of one or more upcoming match ups. The user assigns the highest confidence point value to the match up (i.e., predicted outcome) for which the user is most confident in his or her prediction, the second highest confidence value to the match up for which the user is second most confident, and so on, with the lowest confidence point value being assigned to the match up for which the user is least confident.
Fantasy sports games are typically based on real-life sports games, such as football, baseball, hockey, and the like. However, the user's action of assigning confidence scores to outcomes (e.g., game results) may itself be a game, along with the selection of winners based upon the results of the subject games, e.g., as in the College Bowl Pick 'Em game. The assignment of confidence values may also be related to or part of a larger fantasy sports game in which the user performs other actions, such as selecting real-life players for fantasy sports teams.